Knowledge Transfer: Translation Selection and Its Motivations of Musicology into China

This article examines how Chinese scholars and institutions selected Western musicological works for translation into Chinese and how these choices shaped the formation of musicology as a modern discipline in mainland China from 1900 to 2025. Drawing on disciplinary translation history, it asks which musicological works were translated, who selected and translated them, under what historical and institutional conditions they circulated, and how they contributed to the intellectual development of Chinese musicology. On the basis of translated works, publication records, archival materials, and the secondary literature, the article identifies four historical stages: technical transplantation (1900–1949), planned transplantation (1949–1978), critical transformation (1978–2010), and two-way dialogue (2010–2025). Each stage was shaped by a different configuration of ideology, academic demand, market forces, and translator agency. The article argues that the Chinese translation of Western musicological scholarship was never a passive import of foreign theories. Rather, it was a historically situated process in which Chinese scholars, translators, publishers, and institutions identified, adapted, and reorganized foreign musicological knowledge in response to local academic needs. The findings contribute to knowledge translation studies by offering a diachronic, multi-agent account of translation selection and by explaining how these choices helped shape modern Chinese musicology as a discipline.